REVEREND DR. KEITH NORMAN: The heart is our emotional center of well-being but it is also our physical center of well-being. And so when we have a healthy emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being all anchored in the heart, we're healthy overall. What good does it help us or does it prosper us to have wealth or to have access to so many other things when our physical bodies can't enjoy that? So what we want to do is make sure that we're centered mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically.

Well, my advocacy around health and health outcomes began when I looked at the community to see some of the things that we really needed. We were in a food desert, we did not have a lot of parks and recreational spaces that were safe for people to play and walk around. And there were not a lot of access points for people to get primary health care. So I began at that point to advocate for primary health care providers to come to our community as well as for healthy food options, and for improved exercise and walking paths for people in safe areas. Realizing that we had resources in our community, the American Heart Association and others, they also became partners with us and alongside us to help us find ways to get low cost free accessible things available to the people who live and work in these communities.

So in urban communities, people often are told what to do but they don't often have access to those particular things as well as how to get it done. For instance, you don't typically find gymnasiums that have counselors or have people who can help you with dietary decisions. You don't typically have grocery stores where you can find the fresh fruits and vegetables that you need. You don't typically have the safe parks and the walking paths and the exercise programs that you need. But by using a large urban church in this community and accessing and making those types of programs possible for the residents at a free price point, it helps to alleviate the barriers.

Oftentimes people know what to do because they'll go to the doctor or if they have a heart episode or health care episode they are told what to do and they're given handouts, but they don't have anyone to guide them and to help them. We can do that here in our church as a part of an overall spiritual healthy living program as well as just a good moral thing to do to help people live a high quality life. Well, all that we would do is to make sure that we help people to, again access those low cost and even free resources that can improve their health outcomes. It is so important that we connect healthy living and options together not in just a rhetorical sense of advising people, but in really making it a reality, a healthy park, a safe well lit walking trail, maybe a bicycle trail, maybe healthier food options right there in your own community. And then right there in the church in which you participate, we've removed unhealthy options from vending machines. We've removed unhealthy options from the food offerings that we have at church by offering a healthier way of life and encouraging people to make it a part of their daily living.

We see less stress. We hope to visit fewer hospital rooms, and then we hope to have longer, higher, healthier, quality lives. When we look at heart health, we recognize that something as simple as walking and dietary change can make a huge difference. And so walking is something that all of us can do. So we challenge one another. We open our gymnasium. There's something you can do it every age, there's something you can do with your entire family. And then we recognize that it has such a lasting impact on your overall health. Your heart health it's going to affect almost everything. And so we recognize by using the pulpit and using the influence that we have to bring these issues in front of people, to have heart health conferences, to link up with free resources in our community. This can have a very, very strong impact, and it's such a low hanging piece of fruit if you will, where we can start and then we can improve together.